Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits Read Online Free

breaths.
    ÊºNear goners, the both of us. . . . Both of us perishin’ near goners. . . . What the devil for . . . did I want to go doin’ a fool thing like that?ʺ
    At length he crawled across the floor and pushed the door shut. He crawled back to the stove, dragged off his gloves, found his stick and used it and the arm of his chair to haul himself to his feet. With shaking hands, he poured out a mug of tea. It was now stewed until it would have tanned hide, which was how he liked it. He added sweetened condensed milk to cancel the bitterness and, still in his coat and boots, settled into his chair. He sipped slowly, thinking about the bird.
    One of the knick-knacks in the Cabinet ’Ouse , he decided. Old earl picked up an egg or two in his travels, didn’t he? Maybe this one needed a bit more ’eat than most to get it goin’, same way sycamore seed needs a bit of frost. Funny all those scholars comin’, and still missin’ it—kickin’ thesselves in their graves, I shouldn’t wonder. Any road, I’ll be keepin’ this to myself for now. Not tellin’ nobody about it, that I’m not.
    From time to time, he heard the bird fidgeting around inside the stove, but without any sounds of distress, so he left it alone. Normally when he fed the fire, provided it was drawing well, he just pitched a couple of logs in without looking and put the lid back on, but obviously he’d have to stop doing that now, so he fetched the tongs, chose a couple of logs, lifted the lid and peered inside. The bird had rearranged the burning wood to its liking and was now huddled down into a regular nest, just like a wild bird out in the wood.
    ÊºWatch your ’ead, sonny,ʺ he called, and lowered a log in with the tongs. The bird looked up as it came and nudged it into position. The same with the second log. Quite the little Lordship , thought Dave as he closed the lid. But I could do with a creature about the house again. Been missin’ that since old Fitz died. Better be gettin’ a few more logs in. Wonder what it likes to eat.
    So, on the first day of the first year of the new century, which was also the hundred and first year of his own life, Dave Moffard embarked on a fresh relationship with a fellow creature.

    For the first couple of weeks, he didn’t see much of the bird. It was very little trouble. Regularly, morning and evening, it would cheep loudly, and he’d lift the lid of the stove, reach in with the tongs and lift it gently out onto the top. It would strut to the edge, twist smartly round, raise its rapidly lengthening tail plumes and excrete forcibly over the rim, jet-black tarry pellets that stuck wherever they landed and hardened like rock as they cooled. After the first couple of times, he stood ready with a spare bit of board to catch them.
    It then stayed in the open for several minutes, gazing round at the room with an air both fascinated and baffled, as though Dave’s cottage were the last place on earth where it had expected to find itself. This gave him a chance to study it properly.
    It was fledging fast. As the true feathers showed through the down, it became clear that they weren’t all going to be of the same glowing orange-gold as the primaries, but might be anything from a deep smoky amber to intense pale yellow—any of the colours, indeed, that you might see among the embers on an open hearth with a good fire going. It was also growing. Soon, he realised, it would be the size of a bantam, and he was going to have trouble getting it in and out of the stove. This despite the fact that it didn’t seem to eat anything. He’d tried offering it scraps the first few times it had appeared—bread crumbs, shreds of mutton, a beetle, a little of the buckwheat he used to keep for the pheasants and so on—but it hadn’t been interested. Then on the third morning it emerged with a live ember in its beak. Once it had